Hoteliers Reinventing the Boutique Hotel | travelandleisure.com
With their intimate, unconventional properties around the globe, these six trailblazers are transforming the boutique hotel.
External Articles
From Hotel Rivals to Allies | nytimes.com
Amid signs that their industry has finally turned a corner after two dark years, hotel executives have begun to plot strategies for better times ahead. But those strategies differ, depending on whether they are running a big chain or independent hotel. Major chains like Marriott and Starwood are increasingly focusing on expanding abroad, as tight credit markets make it tough for developers to build hotels in the United States. They are also experimenting with teaming up with independent hoteliers, a strategy that departs from their core business of managing brands.
The Newest Amenity in High-End Hotels: Real Art | huffingtonpost.com
Along with the high room rate, there are certain characteristics to be found in luxury (increasingly called "boutique") hotels these days: The mattresses are Tempur-Pedic; the thread counts of the sheets are 180 or higher; the shower has a deluxe nozzle, and the bathroom has a telephone; the televisions are 54-inch LCD flat panels; rooms are wired for high-speed Internet access; the contemporary artwork on the walls is original. Whoa, original art, and by contemporary artists?
Designer Hotels: Will the Wealthy Pay to Sleep With Armani or Versace? | bnet.com
Fashion designer Giorgio Armani recently opened his first hotel in Dubai and plans another in Milan. Both are part of trend among designers to extend their brands through hotels — while making big money along the way. (Rooms range from $1,100 to $11,000 a night.) After all, the wealthy always need a place to stay, so why not in a designer hotel?
W Hotels Goes Local | With 15 locations in the works, the boutique-hospitality brand is taking a site-sensitive approach to building its global empire | metropolismag.com
Fifteen years ago, an overnight business trip usually meant a lonely night in the room of a national hotel chain. Such a stay may have entailed a few tidy comforts—stacks of folded white towels, a neatly made bed, and a well-stocked minibar—but a Marriott never really feels like a home away from home. There’s a reason, after all, why filmmakers gravitate toward the cold regularity of the hotel as a backdrop for murderous rampages and sordid trysts. But that all changed in 1998, when the mega hospitality corporation Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide began building a brand of hotels to capture what was then becoming known as the “boutique” market. The new enterprise was trademarked W, and it would revolutionize the hospitality industry.
High end hotel stresses creativity | Interview with Matt Greene, GM at San Diego Hard Rock Hotel
Matt Greene likes to joke that he’s a short, middle-aged businessman and not especially cool, hardly the profile of someone you’d expect to be running one of the hippest hotels in town. But that hasn’t been a liability in Greene’s quest to ensure that the Hard Rock Hotel remains one of San Diego’s most inviting, swank and, yes, hip hotels
Top 10 hotels that were never built | hoteliermiddleeast.com
Full Moon Hotel. This hotel was meant to be built in Baku, Azerbaijan, and was quickly dubbed the death star. A 521-foot-tall hotel with 382 rooms on 35 floors, it may be going ahead, but if it is, it is doing it quietly. One Baku resident commented on a blog: 'I live in Baku too. But I've never heard about this plan and death star and moon. This hotel is something new. I saw pictures, but I thought it is just pictures.' No need to get Luke Skywalker quite yet.
Gansevoort founders unhappy about new management | miamiherald.com
The Gansevoort South hotel in Miami Beach is under new management -- and the founders aren't happy. William and Michael Achenbaum, the father-and-son New York developers who opened the Gansevoort in 2008, lost the 334-room hotel to the lender three weeks ago.
W Hotels to Name a 'Fashion Director' | wsj.com
Putting a new spin on the term "designer hotel," boutique chain W Hotels is hiring a fashion director to amp up its style credentials and its profile within the fashion industry. After a two-year search, the chain is planning to announce next week—on Feb. 11, the opening day of New York Fashion Week—that it has hired stylist Amanda Ross in what is very likely a first for the hotel industry. W Hotels, which operates 36 properties worldwide, is a unit of Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide Inc.
Could we soon be staying in floating hotels in the future? | cnn.com
We could one day be spending our holidays in a gigantic vertical airship that floats thousands of meters above ground if a design concept by Seymourpowell becomes reality. The project dubbed the Aircruise is a radical new design that promises to accommodate guests in a 265-meter tall hotel that could float above city skylines or over dramatic landscapes.
Checking Into the New Andaz NYC | The New Middle | nytimes.com
Andaz Wall Street, Hyatt’s first New York boutique hotel, opened this week (with a Midtown location to follow this spring), and if I’m reading the tea leaves about what this means for many of the nearly 50 hotels that will open in New York this year, one theme emerges: recession luxe. The Andaz property, part of an entirely new brand for Hyatt, is a far cry from last year’s extremes of old-school opulence and flophouse chic. In June, the unabashedly luxurious Pierre Hotel reopened, flaunting a $100 million renovation and posting room rates of the “if you have to ask …” variety. Then the Crosby Hotel opened, with each of the 86 rooms awash in bespoke fabric and art, and priced to match. Conversely, the aggressively gritty Ace and Jane Hotels, the latter featuring communal bathrooms, promised hipster cred on the cheap.
Starwood makes new allegations against Hilton in corporate spying case | usatoday.com
Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta sends a message to "team members" about Starwood's new claims. (See below.) As the hotel industry continues to struggle in a weak market, Starwood Hotels just upped the ante in its fight against rival hotel giant Hilton Worldwide. Starwood filed additional charges in a new court filing against Hilton yesterday in the U.S. Southern District of New York. The new filing claims that top Hilton officials - including Hilton Worldwide CEO Christopher Nassetta, Hilton's global development chief Steven Goldman and "at least five of the 10 members" of Hilton's executive committee - knew that Hilton possessed Starwood's confidential material.
Ace Hotel Group: From economy to extravagant | hotelnewsnow.com
The U.S. hotel industry has lost more than just rate premiums, according to Alex Calderwood. It’s lost a sense of personality as well. Calderwood should know something about individualism personified in brick and mortar. He, along with his fellow co-founders, started Ace Hotel Group, which manages and partly owns a four-property portfolio of boutique hotels that is brimming with as much character as a big-budget acting ensemble.
Best of Year Awards, 2009 | hotelsmag.com
Winners were announced live December 3, 2009 during a magnificent celebration at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Watch this space for updates and slideshows of all the winners and information on the 2010 5th Annual Best of Year Awards.
Abu Dhabi Hotel Opens with World's Largest LED Project | interiordesign.net
Prepare to be mesmerized. The newest architectural marvel of the Middle East, YAS Hotel in Abu Dhabi, was recently completed in conjunction with the launch of the inaugural 2009 Formula 1 Etihad Airways Abu Dhabi Grand Prix held at the new circuit built around the hotel. The hotel features the world’s biggest LED project to date, controlled through remote device management (RDM) protocol.
Now Booking | A Boston Hotel Double-Play | nytimes.com
Boston is one of those cities that can’t seem to shake its reputation: forget all the cutting-edge biotech and the newfound fashion consciousness and the burgeoning food culture — for many this will always be America’s capital of the buttoned-up, where kicking it old school trumps looking to the future. Yet in the space of less than a month two important new hotels have arrived here, the W and the Ames, and between them they’ve injected a healthy dose of the kind of modernity and style that typifies the new Boston.
Hotels Blossoming in Berlin | nytimes.com
CASA CAMPER, a 51-room hotel in the Mitte district of Berlin, was fully booked when it opened on Sept. 15. The hotel, run by the Spanish urban clothing label Camper, drew a youthful clientele that included fashionable Europeans in party mode and Monocle magazine-toting business travelers who would never stay at a prosaic hotel.
Hotel Review: 3+1 Bedrooms, Beijing | nytimes.com
With its cool, white interiors and raw concrete finishes, Beijing’s new 3+1 Bedrooms is as minimal as its name. Hidden behind a sliding steel door on a quiet hutong, or traditional alleyway, this stylish little hotel has only three rooms and one suite. Too intimate to be pretentious, it has all the amenities (well, almost all) of a larger boutique property — minus, of course, the scene. Still, if it’s the latter you’re looking for, you won’t have to go far. The hotel comes from Cho, as he’s known, a Beijing night-life whiz whose popular Bed Bar is just a few doors down; his Café Sambal and Paper restaurants are also nearby.
Loews upgrading Miami Beach resort hotel | miamiherald.com
Jonathan Tisch walked into the hotel room at the Loews Miami Beach, looked down, and saw too much taupe. Tisch, CEO of Loews Hotels, had approved the carpet months earlier at a design meeting for a major renovation of the oceanfront resort. But after seeing the fabric in a model room, Tisch ordered more blues and greens. ``He felt it was a little drab,'' recalled top designer Greg Walton, of RTKL Associates in Coral Gables. ``He really wanted that Miami feel in the room.'' Tisch, 55, hasn't delegated many decisions when it comes to the first major remake of the most profitable hotel in the Loews chain.
Hotel Review: The Wit in Chicago | nytimes.com
Even in a city filled with striking architecture, the Wit makes a powerful impression — a green-tinted glass box with an angled roof and a yellow lightning bolt shooting down its State Street facade. But there’s much more to the Wit than its design. The hotel, which opened in May, has a superb location in downtown Chicago, bright rooms with mesmerizing views and an eager-to-please staff. During my recent visit, the hotel — the first in a new chain from Doubletree (itself a division of Hilton) — managed to be all things to all people; business travelers, vacationing families and trend-seeking 20-somethings all seemed to love the place.